Majority owner of steelmaker Mechel incurred wrath of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin last summer when Putin accused the company of price-fixing. Relations much improved. Company granted a $1.5 billion loan by state-controlled Vnesheconombank in January. Outlook glum; shares down 96% since last February, and 3.4% of his stake held as loan collateral by UBS investment bank. Now part of mega-merger talk under way among billionaires Alisher Usmanov, Oleg Deripaska, Vladimir Potanin, Dmitry Rybolovlev, and Roman Abramovich, to combine assets and have government assist in restructuring debt. Also in the works: plans to buy West Virginia-based Bluestone Coal Corp for a combination of cash and shares. In 2001 his coal mines and coal trading outfit Yuzhny Kuzbass bought a controlling stake in Chelyabinsk Metallurgical Plant from U.S. billionaire and commodity trader Marc Rich's Glencore. Out of these assets he created steel and mining Mechel Group, which went public in 2004 on the NYSE.